Supporting High Quality Early Childhood Experiences for Children with and Without Disabilities and Their Families in Nevada

It has become common for young children to be enrolled in some form early care or education programs before entering kindergarten (Whitebrook, McLean, & Austin, 2016). These experiences can encompass a range of programs and many families use multiple programs to meet their needs (U.S. Census Bureau, 2013). According to the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services and Education (DHHS/DOE; 2014) early care and education includes programs that: provide early care and education to children birth through age five, where the majority of children in the program are typically developing. These include, but are not limited to, private or publicly funded center or family-based child care, home visiting, Early Head Start, Head Start, private preschool, and public school and community-based pre-kindergarten programs, including those in charter schools. (p.1) Quality early childhood programs help to promote children’s learning and development across all domains of development and prepare them for kindergarten. For children with disabilities, being meaningfully included in early care and education programs can support positive gains in development and learning. Furthermore, these early childhood programs have become vital for parents of young children to seek out employment, further education, and respite from the demands of parenting (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000). However, families of young children with and without disabilities continue to struggle with access to affordable programs that meet the complex needs of families and support high quality and evidence-based early childhood education. As with the rest of the country, Nevada has been working to further the quantity and quality of early care and education experiences for its youngest residents and their families. However, as early childhood programs cross multiple sectors, departments, funding streams, and state and federal policies as well as challenges to serving children in urban, rural, and tribal areas of the state, moving ideas into action has been difficult

Scuplted spirituality

None provided

MPS - Decision Support System for Multiobjective Project Scheduling

The report presents a decision support system (DSS) for multiobjective project scheduling under multiple-category resource constraints. It handles quite a general class of nonpreemptive scheduling problems with renewable, nonrenewable and doubly-constrained resources, multiple performing modes of activities, precedence constraints in the form of an activity network and multiple project performance criteria of time and cost type. The DSS has been implemented on a microcomputer compatible with IBM PC, and called MPS. It is based on three kinds of heuristics: parallel priority rules, simulated annealing and branch-and-bound. The last algorithm can even yield exact solutions when sufficient processing time is available. Some parts of the MPS are interactive, in particular, the search for a best compromise schedule. Graphical facilities enable a thorough evaluation of feasible schedules. The report starts with a methodological guide presenting the problem formulation and the three heuristics. Then, the general scheme of the MPS is given together with an executive guide. An expanding menu and all its options are described and illustrated with a simple example. The last part presents a real problem solving consisting in scheduling 40 farm activities

Playful Thursday Project: Community/University Partners and Lessons Learned in a Longitudinal Study

Community/university partnerships utilizing expressive arts therapy are in a unique position to offer social and emotional support adapted to the needs and varying situations of culturally diverse children living in distressed urban neighborhoods. This three-year community-based participatory research study investigated the impact of a community/university partnership on master-level counseling students, after-school teachers, and elementary school-age students. Findings suggest that a partnership between a university expressive arts social and emotional learning initiative and a community after-school program serving low-income children and families provides noteworthy benefits for both communities. Lessons learned from this partnership can serve as a model for culturally responsive and systemic community/ university collaborations

M2R: a Python add-on to cobrapy for modifying human genome-scale metabolic reconstruction using the gut microbiota models

Motivation: The gut microbiota is the human body's largest population of microorganisms that interact with human intestinal cells. They use ingested nutrients for fundamental biological processes and have important impacts on human physiology, immunity and metabolome in the gastrointestinal tract. Results: Here, we present M2R, a Python add-on to cobrapy that allows incorporating information about the gut microbiota metabolism models to human genome-scale metabolic models (GEMs) like RECON3D. The idea behind the software is to modify the lower bounds of the exchange reactions in the model using aggregated in- and out-fluxes from selected microbes. M2R enables users to quickly and easily modify the pool of the metabolites that enter and leave the GEM, which is particularly important for those looking into an analysis of the metabolic interaction between the gut microbiota and human cells and its dysregulation

Research on Boym’s work and characteristics of Chinese in 17th century Polish Sinology

卜弥格(MichałBoym，1612–1659），这个对今天的中国人与西方人来说都十分陌生的名字，在历史上却是对中国和西方都有着重要贡献的来华传教士。对中国来说，他作为永历王朝的特使出访罗马教堂，这是中国和罗马教廷关系史上的第一次正式的外交活动。对西方来说，他第一次将中国的中药、中医、地理、植物、动物等知识介绍到了西方。 在汉学中的汉语研究方面，卜弥格最为主要的贡献是对“大秦景教流行中国碑”的研究，他为我们提供了一套完善的汉字拉丁注音方案。他的“大秦景教流行中国碑”研究共分三个部分：第一部分是用拉丁文字母对碑文逐字进行注音；第二部分是对大秦景教流行中国碑的碑文逐字解译，把碑文逐字...Boym is a strange name to modern Chinese people and Westerners, but historically he was a missionary who made important contributions to both Chinese and Western civilization. For China, he was a special envoy sent to visit the Pope, and this was the first diplomatic mission between China and the Holy See. To the west, he is notable as one of the first people to introduce Chinese medicine, flora, ...学位：教育硕士院系专业：海外教育学院_汉语国际教育硕士学号：2652012115414

Differential Evolution with Reversible Linear Transformations

Differential evolution (DE) is a well-known type of evolutionary algorithms (EA). Similarly to other EA variants it can suffer from small populations and loose diversity too quickly. This paper presents a new approach to mitigate this issue: We propose to generate new candidate solutions by utilizing reversible linear transformation applied to a triplet of solutions from the population. In other words, the population is enlarged by using newly generated individuals without evaluating their fitness. We assess our methods on three problems: (i) benchmark function optimization, (ii) discovering parameter values of the gene repressilator system, (iii) learning neural networks. The empirical results indicate that the proposed approach outperforms vanilla DE and a version of DE with applying differential mutation three times on all testbeds.Comment: Code: https://github.com/jmtomcza

Project collaborative care: experiences of child care and early intervention providers

Researchers indicate that both child care and IDEA Part C early intervention (EI) providers struggle to understand how to best serve young children with disabilities and their families. The goal of this study was to examine the experiences of child care and EI providers with infants and toddlers with disabilities in child care settings. Specifically, this study focused on how child care and EI programs collaborate. A sequential mixed method approach was employed for the purpose of development. Participants (N=991 (620 child care, 371 EI)), recruited through statewide professional development entities in a large Midwestern state, took part in a survey about their knowledge, beliefs, and experiences related to infants and toddlers with disabilities in child care, as well as their experiences collaborating with other professionals and professional development experiences. Additionally, 24 providers across the state participated in face-to-face focus groups to discuss the topic in more depth. Results indicated that providers across groups value inclusion. Although most child care providers had cared for children with disabilities at some point, and most EI providers had delivered services in child care settings, successful collaborations among groups was rare. Most often child care providers were not formally included in the EI process. Factors that contributed to successful inclusion and collaboration included understanding each other’s purpose, clarifying each other’s roles, and program and state support. Participants suggested that opportunities to build relationships with each other in addition to training on early childhood special education topics would be most beneficial to support collaboration